Also, they gave a bunch of gaming sites a 30 minutes, hands-on demo where they could more or less do what they wanted. It was enhanced a bit so that they could experience "5 hours of content in 30 minutes," so it's not 100% indicative of the game experience, but since each demo was randomly generated, each demo provided a bunch of unique experiences with plenty of unique tidbits filtering in to give a better overall picture of the game in general. I found a great reddit post consolidating a bunch of comments from different sites and news outlets which I highly recommend checking out here. Some highlights to mention:

Quote

An unknown number of races and factions exist in this universe, and members of each will speak to you in their own language. The text is gobbledegook at first, which means that decision-tree conversations can only commence if you make wild guesses.

However, dotted across each planet are monoliths. These giant tablets with alien calligraphy function like the Rosetta Stone. Discovering them will further increase your language skills, meaning that more of each race's speech text will be translated into English. At some point you will be able to make calculated guesses about what each faction representative is saying to you ("Can XXX XX offering XX XXX technology?"), and later your conversations will be fluent.

Monoliths also teach you some lore about each race. Additionally, sleeping in front of them will restore your health.

Each race has its own technologies, such as different types of ships and suits. The only creature I encountered appeared to be an android, and my guess is that it was in awe of my presence.

When conversing, choosing the right option can make races happy. Frequent interactions can raise your reputation within each faction. Friendly factions can open up trading options, and even offer items such as upgraded weapons. The races who you befriend will help you in their own specialised field--one could be skilled in the sciences, for example, meaning your bond will increase some of your tech skills.

Players have a standing with each of the races, who have their own relationships and rivalries with each other, much like in Civilization.

Sean goes onto explain that there is real value in developing relationships with these characters. If you make the effort to learn the language of a particular race and interact with them regularly, your standing with them will increase. If you’re tight with a particular race, they’ll duly give you preferential treatment – cheaper prices perhaps, or better equipment. Indeed, if you want to buy a better ship that might allow you to travel to more distant star systems, you’ll need to cosy up with these factions.“If you’re playing the game for exploration’s sake, you might want to focus on that race. But if you’re playing the game and all you want to do is kill things, there are more military-based races, so you might want to try and become friends with them.”

...

“Having said that, being No Man’s Sky, there is a procedural element to your interactions. The AI you talk to will know the name of the planet you’re on and will reference it. They’ll reference wanting certain things based on the environment they’re in. They’ll know if it’s cold, or hot, or whatever. You’ll see a reasonable amount of variety – it’s not just pre-baked dialogue.”Before all of you who failed French class at school start getting a little nervous, No Man’s Sky is not expecting you to learn complex grammar, syntax, verb forms, pronunciation and so forth. To take a simplistic view of it, the languages are more like codes to decipher – generally speaking, you’re simply replacing a word for a word. That was a deliberate decision, made in order to foster a sense of collaboration and coordination amongst the game’s community of players. If you figure out what a particular word means, you can paste it up online and share the knowledge.“Some of the languages – well, one in particular – is much harder to learn than the others,” Sean adds. “I think it will probably only be possible for people to decipher some of the dialogue by working together online.

The game looks interesting but I really hate how slowly they're revealing it. Those 18 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay had maybe like 30 seconds of new stuff, otherwise it was just things we've already seen.

Well, IGN is doing a second month of deeper coverage of this game (A first for them I believe) and has finally gone more in depth with what exactly the experience will be like. First, here are the videos they've released so far this month: